Reports from ASCO, the nation’s biggest cancer conference, this year again were full of stunning stories about the success of older and new immuno therapies. The race has never been hotter for biomarkers to target patient groups. Most of this new class of drugs--which harnesses the immune system to go after the cancer--inhibit an immune checkpoint called programmed cell death protein 1 or PDL1. So frontline cancer treatment these days typically includes a test for the PDL1 biomarker. But there are a breadth of potential targets in the immune system that promise to make this class of cancer drug even more effective.

Today we talk with Mark Gardner, CEO of OmniSeq, who has just received approval from New York State (the company is in Buffalo) to launch their new Immune Report Card.

“The biology is complicated. Even for folks that are PDL1 high, in the majority of cases those patients are not going to respond to these drugs. The average number of responders is 20-30%. So we know something else is going on. It turns out we’ve known some of the mechanisms for how the tumors are achieving "immune escape.” What we’ve not had the ability to do is to simultaneously measure across the range of hypotheses for how that tumor is escaping."

Omniseq's Immune Report Card includes mutational burden and MSI testing, which is common practice today. The two additional “legs” of the report are copy number variation for PDL1 as well as RNAseq.